The linguistic digital divide
The French-language Canadian journal Minorités linguistiques et société publishes in its Issue 23, 2024, dedicated to “Digital Technology and Linguistic Communities in Minority Settings: Roles, Impacts, and Challenges,” an open-access article by Virginie Hébert and Maria Bodron titled “The Linguistic Digital Divide: A Framing Analysis of the Literature on Language Inequalities in the Digital Environment.” Link: https://doi.org/10.7202/1124262ar
This article is interesting for several reasons:
- To our knowledge, this is the first time that a systematic effort to research, compile, and analyze has been undertaken at the intersection of the digital divide and linguistic diversity. The dominant view of the digital divide—one that is entirely technology-focused and obsessed with access—has historically overshadowed fundamental issues such as digital literacy and linguistic diversity.
- For their systematic review, the authors cross-referenced three categories, each comprising about ten terms, synonyms for divide, or for digital or linguistic, and focused their search for sources on both academic literature and gray literature (which we consider very wise for a topic where civil society has been highly active in the field of action research, and often ahead of the academic world). They systematized their search, covering the period 1995–2024, using the databases Érudit, CAIRN, ERIC, HAL, Scopus, and Google Scholar, then supplemented this with manual searches within international organizations competent in these areas (such as UNESCO), and subsequently used the bibliographies of the identified sources to systematically expand the number of sources to be analyzed.
- The methodological approach was followed by a method known as frameworking, which thus employs another form of systematization, this time focused on content analysis.
- Last but not least, the result of such a thorough examination of all the concepts underlying the “linguistic digital divide” could have turned out to be unappealing, hard to digest, or even unpalatable—but none of that is the case! The result is a very enjoyable read, as well as an enriching one, connecting and fostering dialogue between sources that might otherwise remain unaware of one another, as bridges between gray literature and academic scholarship are rare.
In short, this is a reference work.
This is an area where AI is making a major impact, which should encourage the authors to update the text in a few years—or sooner—to focus on the effects of AI on the subject.